Your best and worst stock purchases

Worst: LVVV (by far. Thanks a lot Tigerrrdad)

worst, evergreen solar ... best, nutanix

GE a couple years ago is my worst. Still holding... and hoping....

I don’t have any great ones but a lot of solid returns the past few years in various tech: apple, Amazon , Cisco to name a couple

Best VCM
Worst REGI

Bought Apple at $20. Sold at $25 and was happy.

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What were some of your best stock purchases and your worst ones and when? Trying to learn more from the OT baws

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The worst was a company called Entremed.

Interesting story. Entremed was a Pharma startup. In the late-1990's, during the dotcom boom, the company announced it was trialing a drug which would selectively attack metastatic vascular endothelium. In laymen's terms, it would cutoff blood flow to cancerous tumors, selectively killing them.

I came home from a very long call night, turned on the CNBC morning show and Mark Haines, Kernan, and Faber were all discussing a breaking NewYorkTimes story. According to the Times, conversations had leaked from the previous evening that James Watson (Nobel prize winner for DNA discovery) had access to Entremed's trial studies. Watson supposedly told a dinner group Entremed was owner of the biggest medical breakthrough since the Salk Vaccine.

Essentially it was the cure to cancer!

Now I had followed Watson through the years. He is brilliant! He is as straight a shooter as they come. He is prone to understatement. If this man said the drug was a godsend, it was.

We were sitting on about 15% cash, and I asked Ms NC, who handled our investments at time, to move all 15% to Entremed.

By the time markets opened, I'd crashed. Woke up late that afternoon, and to my chagrin she'd chased the thing with incremental limit orders all day and only picked up a small position. The stock opened on fire and tripled in a day to something like $50+/share.

I'd have bought there, but at that time we didn't have afterhours access. IIRC, that evening Watson publicly denounced the story as a complete fabrication. He'd never made the statement.

Someone had obviously gamed the market.

Wasn't even investigated as far as I know. Unbelievable. Entremed dropped like a rock. Trails were unimpressive. We lost a couple of thousand bucks, but it could have been much worse. Within a couple of years the thing was a penny stock. MsNC still gives me a hard time about it.

Best purchase? Probably a nice position in AAPL in 2009, both because of the size and ROI.

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Best: Bought 1,000 shares AMZN in 2001 @ 10.00/sh

Worst: Sold same shares a couple years later @ 30.oo/sh and thought I was a genius...

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Damn that hurts.

Best UGAZ

Worst UGAZ

No offense, but you won’t really learn anything from reading about what stocks people made or lost money on.

First thing you need to know (about yourself) is do you want to be a trader or an investor... or both? Figure out your short term (trading) goals and your long term (investing) goals. Develop some rules for both approaches. And it doesn’t matter who it is, or whether they made money or not, if a person can’t tell you why they bought and why they sold, just be nice to them, nod and keep walking. Until I developed a methodology, I was just flipping pasta at the wall, hoping that something stuck.

I’d suggest checking out Investors Business Daily. It’s a good resource and you can learn a lot about position sizing, as well as entry and exit strategies, among other things. And there are plenty of other free or low cost investment resources besides that one.

Good luck.